1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains to a method for teaching speech reading and to apparatus for carrying out the method.
2. Prior Art
Speech reading, often referred to as lip reading, is a tremendous asset to persons who are either deaf or hard of hearing. Typically, speech reading has heretofore been taught by first teaching the student the position of the various visible facial articulatory structures corresponding to the individual sounds which, when uttered in proper combination, comprise speech in the particular language being taught. While this is relatively easy to do, the next step, in which the student is taught to speech read at normal conversational speech rates, is more difficult. This latter step is most often accomplished by having the instructor mouth a particular word or group of words which the student then attempts to identify. As the student becomes more proficient, the instructor increases his speech rate until the student is able to speech read at conversational speech rates. A more synthetic approach has also been employed in which facial, gestural and environmental cues are emphasized, and the student begins to speech read at a word, phrase, or higher level.
These approaches have met with limited success due to a number of drawbacks inherent in the techniques used in teaching them. First, different persons employ facial articulatory structures in different manners for the production of the same sounds. As a result, once a student has learned speech reading with a particular instructor he may have difficulty speech reading the speech of other persons. Second, the teaching methods currently employed are quite tedious, with the result that the student quickly loses interest. This is especially true with adults. Thirdly, while the use of gestural and environmental cues can presently be encouraged and taught, there is typically little carry over of their use to the student's everyday life because of shortcomings in the techniques currently used to teach them, e.g. a limited number of environmental cues can be practiced in a therapy type setting.